Dash (DASH) is a cryptocurrency similar to bitcoin and Litecoin.[1] DASH is one of the most popular privacy coins. With a market capitalization of over $850 million, CoinMarketCap ranked DASH as the 16th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization as of mid September 2019.[2]

DASH was originally called "Darkcoin." The company changed its name on March 25, 2015. The company chose this name because it's a portmanteau of "digital" and "cash."[3]

Contents

Overview

Dash is an altcoin designed to make cryptocurrency transactions "fast, cheap, and private."[4] Dash's company is structured as a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).[5][6] Instead of traditional corporate leadership, Dash is decentralized and democratized; instead of a board of directors or a CEO making decisions crucial to the company, Dash relies on "Masternodes", or miners who have at least 1000 Dash digital tokens. The company believes that, in the case of individuals whose wealth depends so significantly on the success of Dash, these masternodes are incentivized to make prudent decisions for the sake of the company as a whole. As such, major decisions are voted on, their votes recorded directly onto Dash's blockchain.[7] Through this method, Dash's creators hope to allow for adaptability in Dash's software and user practices, as well as cohesion within the Dash community. Ideally, this can prevent a hard fork, such as the one that led to the creation of bitcoin cash.[8]

Funding also works differently. Instead of 100% of newly-mined Dash coins going to its miners, the network gives 45% to miners, 45% to superminers, and withholds 10% as a treasury. This 10% pool is the revenue source from which the company hires marketing consultants, coders, auditors, and so on.[9]

Products and Services

InstantSend and PrivateSend

Dash features two unique functions capabilities: enabling Dash transactions at speeds that make them viable for everyday, small transactions, and creating transactions that offer privacy to one's payment history, by erasing the digital trail one's public address has on the blockchain.[10][11]These services are called InstantSend and PrivateSend, respectively.[12]

InstantSend is meant to allow users to use Dash to pay for goods in services in a traditional retail environment, or other fast-paced settings where waiting several minutes or more for a confirmation from the blockchain would make the digital asset nonviable as a payment method.[13] Using InstantSend, masternodes on the Dash blockchain can generate irreversible transaction confirmations. Instead of sending transactions into the whole of the blockchain (the bitcoin method), masternodes facilitating InstantSend can create these same confirmations within approximately 1.3 seconds.[14] The masternode locks the transaction once it's confirmed to prevent double-spending.[15]

PrivateSend allows users the option to break the digital history leading to past transactions with one's coins by having masternodes essentially swap inputs, or coins, between users. Although these inputs retain the exact same value, transactions made this way cannot be easily traced back to another user.[16]

History

In August 2019 Ryan Taylor, CEO of the Dash Core Group, told attendees of an event hosted by Coindesk that Dash was "the most used" cryptocurrency in Venezuela, referencing the crippling economic issues the people of Venezuela were facing at the time. This is not necessarily the case, though. A story later published by Coindesk revealed that Dash billboards are common in Venezuela, and that Dash had given promotional cellphones with integrated wallets to boost adoption of the cryptocurrency. Despite this, the story said that Coindesk "have found scant evidence to support claims that Dash is the most widely-used cryptocurrency in Venezuela," and that there were only an estimated 10,000 active Dash wallets in Venezuela. Coindesk later edited the story; originally it said that 80 percent of Venezuela's merchants used Dash in 2018 - according to the correction, the correct statement was that 80 percent of the businesses in Venezuela that already accepted Dash had been signed up by the Dash Merchant project, a major marketing push by Dash to spur adoption in Venezuela.[17][18]

In September 2019, Coinbase announced that its Coinbase Pro trading platform would begin supporting trading for DASH later that month.[19]